A) I’ve always liked Jrpgs, pretty much for as long as I’ve been playing games. I think I find comfort in the familiarity of battling and levelling. JRPGs tend to have a cast of characters you get attached to and spend a lot of time with. Often the soundtracks are bangers too. Usually the art is lovely. But I still play lots of other genres as well.
B) I don’t cling to the classics that much. I like them, but I’m perfectly fine with moving forward. That being said if there’s one thing to take from them, it’s that you can keep the budget/scale down of a game and it can still be enjoyable. I think Final Fantasy XVI looks rad and I love that SE is pushing the envelope, but I also know that it will be another 6+ years before we FFXVII since the dev times keep ballooning. On the hand, you’ve got a company like Falcom which can churn out great games much more frequently because they look 2-3 generations behind. And that’s okay.
C) It all comes down to the writing. If you can handle a large cast like Trails, go for it. If you can’t handle it, you wind up with Chrono Cross or Suikoden (games I like for the record) which have a handful of characters I remember but the vast majority are all filler and forgettable. Some games have small casts and can’t make them compelling either. So the size doesn’t matter to me, just how well written they are
u prefer JRPGs to other video game genres ? (fps, racing, fighting etc)
I don’t. I enjoy games from all types of different genres. From Forza to Hitman to Resident Evil to Persona to Halo to Mass Effect and so on, I truly do play a bit of everything.
What you wish modern JRPG would do differently today compared the classics of the past ?
I’ve always thought the term JRPG is a bit of a misnomer. I get that early JRPGs were heavily inspired by table-top role playing games, with stats and classes and levels and character progression, but they’ve always been missing one crucial aspect of TTRPGs: actual role-playing. With a lot of JRPGs you play as a predefined character with a predefined Story in a predefined world. There’s not usually too many meaningful choices.
Now, there’s a reason for that. Most JRPGs tend to focus on telling a story and it gets more and more difficult to tell a cohesive and/or deep story with each meaningful choice the player is able to make. Don’t get me wrong, I like the focus that many JRPGs have on story, and I don’t want all modern JRPGs to have big branching stories or become create-your-own-adventure type games, but I would love to see some more JRPGs try their hand at true role-playing mechanics like that.
As an aside, if a game has a silent, self-insert protagonist, let me customize their appearance and give me dialogue options, or just forget it and make a normal predefined character that talks and has their own personality. If they’re supposed to represent me, then fucking let me make them look and act how I want them to. Absolutely nothing about that boring-ass, dumb-looking dope from DQXI makes me feel like it’s really me in the story. It’s not immersive and I wish they stop it with that shit.
Do you feel modern games have a harder times making great games because it cost too much and the scale of it today or because game dev are younger and from a different generations from the classics of the past or the golden era etc ?
No. Not at all. In fact, I vehemently disagree with the entire idea that any previous era was a so-called “golden era” as well as the idea that today’s developers make fewer great games. In fact, I think we have more great games nowadays, we just don’t realize that they’re classics because not enough time has passed yet. I guarantee you that in 10 years, everybody will look back and talk about how great the games were in the late 2010s/early 2020s. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but don’t let it fool you, there are a ton of great modern gam
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